AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH, AGAIN!!! I STILL REQUIRE EVERYONE TO READ THE NEAPOLITAN NOVELS SO THAT I CAN TALK WITH YOU ABOUT HOW GREAT THEY ARE; THANKS IN ADVANCE/THANK ME LATER.

yeah so i stayed up basically all night after thanksgiving to read this; no regrets.

gonna start writing up some quotations before i gotta give it back to the library (thank you chicago public library for giving me all of your elena ferrante books):

p. 19: “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.”

p. 90: “How easy it was to do wrong. I sought excuses that might seem convincing to her, but I wasn’t able to make them even to myself. I sensed that the foundations of my behavior were flawed, I was silent.”

p. 284: “I loved them both and so I couldn’t love myself, feel myself, affirm myself with a need for life of my own, one that had the same blind, mute force as theirs. So it seemed to me.” (also the “blind, mute” here is a good echo of when they talk about Beckett)

p. 336: “How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done.” (really wonder how “time quiets down” comes across in the original Italian but it is a lovely phrase. and every time Elena talks about the story of her and Lila you see the “dissolving boundaries” of Lila’s life are also her own)

p. 401: “Every word of Lila’s diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor.”

p. 433: (gettin’ meta) “ Finally I reread some pages, I didn’t like them, and I forgot about it. But I found out that I was calmer, as if the same had passed from me to the notebook.”

UGH ALSO THE WHOLE LAST SCENE OF LILA IN THIS BOOK IS SO INTENSE AND GREAT

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